White House releases 46-minute ‘address’ by Donald Trump complaining about losing the election

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President Donald Trump has released a 46-minute video calling for the election result to be ‘overturned’ and repeating a long series of his claims alleging widespread voter fraud.

The address from the White House came a day after Attorney General Bill Barr said there was not enough evidence of fraud to overturn the result, a raft of judges have not accepted Trump’s claims and several of the allegations made in the video have already been debunked.

But the President began the video by saying it ‘may be the most important speech I’ve ever made’ – then got to work trying to make the case that the election was fraudulent, that the results should be overturned in multiple states where President-elect Joe Biden got more votes than he did, and urged the Supreme Court to intervene. 

At one point, he held up a chart purporting to show a scheme to steal the election, but a spike in votes he pointed to has been identified as Milwaukee County votes being counted once they came in. President-elect Joe Biden performed well there, as have past Democratic candidates going back years.

He made repeated claims of fraud, dead people voting, mysterious anomalies in voting machines, and alleged corruption in big cities with Democratic votes that went for Joe Biden. 

‘Even what I’m saying now will be demeaned and disparaged,’ he predicted as he laid out claim after claim, including several that have been put forward by his legal team and been debunked. 

‘This election was rigged. Everyone knows it. I don’t mind if I lose an election, but I want to lose an election fair and square. What I don’t want to do is have it stolen from the American people,’ Trump complained.  

Many of the President’s claims centred on the large number of mail-in ballots at the election and states that counted them after in-person ballots. In these states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia Trump would appear to build up a large lead as Republicans mostly voted in person, before that lead appeared to vanish as overwhelmingly Democrat mail-in votes were counted. 

Trump said: ‘For months leading up to the election, we were warned that we should not declare a premature victory. We were told repeatedly that it would take weeks, if not months, to determine the winner, to count the absentee ballots, and to verify the results.”

“It was all very, very strange. Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to annoint a winner even while many key states were still being counted. 

There were five editing jumps in the first three minutes of the video alone, giving in an awkward pace.

Hours later, the Trump campaign announced the president had launched yet another lawsuit contesting the election results in Wisconsin. 

Trump is personally suing the state, including the Wisconsin Elections Commission as well as local and state officials for ‘unlawful and unconstitutional acts’ during the election process. 

The complaint claims public officials undermined the election by disregarding ‘safeguards meant to prevent absentee ballot fraud.’

The lawsuit repeats many of Trump’s allegations against the mail-in ballots that he has made in other lawsuits, such as ballot tampering and lack of voter information certifications. 

He has also accused the mayors in the state’s five largest cities – Milwaukee, Madison, Kenosha, Green Bay and Racine – of concocting an ‘unlawful plan to expand absentee voting by using  ‘un-manned drop boxes.’ 

The lawsuit comes just a few days after Wisconsin further cemented Biden’s victory in the state in two county recounts that increased his lead over Trump by 87 votes.

Biden’s vote approached 81 million votes Wednesday, and his leads is well beyond 6million, while he is electoral college win is shaping up to be 306 to 232. 

But Trump in his video said it was ‘statistically impossible’ that he didn’t prevail.

He pointed to ‘unexpected success all over the country and right here in Washington,’ saying: ‘It is statistically impossible that the person – me – that led the charge lost. 

‘The greatest pollsters, the real pollsters – not the ones that had us down 17 points in Wisconsin when we actually won, while the ones that had us down four or five points in Florida and we won by many points or had us even down in Texas, and we won by a lot – not those pollsters but real pollsters that are fair and honest, said “We can’t understand a thing like this: it’s never happened before you led the country to victory and you were the only one that was lost. It’s not possible.’ 

And Tump claimed that the media and judges refuse to accept his ‘evidence’.

 Trump said: ‘What I don’t want to do is have it stolen from the American people.

“That’s what we’re fighting for, and we have no choice (but) to be doing that. We already have the proof, we already have the evidence, and it’s very clear.

“Many people in the media, and even judges so far, have refused to accept it. They know it’s true, they know it’s there, they know who won the election. But they refuse to say, ‘You’re right.’ Our country needs somebody to say, ‘You’re right.’”

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has rejected the Trump campaign’s lawsuit arguing that the result should be thrown out, because Republican poll watchers were prevented from observing votes being counted. The court ruled the state’s treatment of observers. 

In Michigan a judge ruled that election observers’ allegations of fraud were ”incorrect and not credible’ and in Georgia U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Batten Sr said the campaign’s fraud case was backed by ‘precious little proof’. 

Mr Trump accused the Democrats of using the coronavirus pandemic as a pretext to ‘rig’ the election. 

He said: ‘What changed this year was the Democrat Party’s relentless push to print and mail out tens of millions of ballots, sent to unknown recipients, with virtually no safeguards of any kind,” the President said.

‘This allowed fraud and abuse to occur on a scale never seen before. Using the pandemic as a pretext, Democrat politicians and judges drastically changed election procedures just months, and in some cases, weeks before the election.’

 Changing election procedures is a reference to Pennsylvania’s decision to accept mail-in ballots cast that were mailed on election day but arrived three days later. There are not nearly enough of these votes to challenge Mr Biden’s lead of more than 80,000 votes in the state. 

Mr Trump also challenged the use of vote counting machines made by a Canadian company called Dominion, falsely claiming the results are counted ‘in foreign countries’. 

 Trump said: ‘On top of everything else, we have a company that’s very suspect. Its name is Dominion,” Mr Trump said.

‘With the turn of a dial or the change of a chip, you could press a button for Trump and the vote goes to Biden. What kind of a system is this?’

Trump’s loss came despite Republicans holding the Senate and turning back numerous Democrats who were leading in pre-election polls, and picking up multiple seats in an election that many predicted would be a ‘blue wave.’ 

Trump, though, called the election a ‘total catastrophe’ and said the results couldn’t be trusted.

He complained about ‘machinery that was stopped during certain parts of the evening miraculously to open with more votes.’

‘Many people in the media and even judges so far have refused to accept it. They know it’s true. They know it’s there. They know who won the election. But they refuse to say: you’re right. Our country needs somebody to say you’re right,’ he said.

He made claims of dead people voting, although several examples brought forth by his lawyers have gone bust. 

‘Millions of votes were cast illegally in the swing states alone,’ he claimed. 

‘If that’s the case, the results of the individual swing states must be overturned and overturned immediately,’ Trump said.

‘Some people say that’s too far out. That’s too harsh. Well does that mean we take a president and we’ve just elected a president, where the votes were fraudulent? No. It means you have to turn over the election.’

‘What a disaster election this was. A total catastrophe,’ he said. 

He said ‘hopefully’ the Supreme Court of the U.S. will ‘see it’ and ‘do what’s right for our country.’  

At one point, he appeared to connect his push to overturn election results to his personal legal situation.

‘Now, I hear that these same people that failed to get me in Washington have sent every piece of information to New York so that they can try to get me there,’ Trump said, in reference to prosecutors who have been investigating his company over possible allegations of insurance or tax fraud. 

Trump spoke a day after Attorney General Bill Barr said there was not enough evidence of fraud to overturn the results. 

‘Maybe you’ll have a revote, but I don’t think that’s appropriate. When those votes are corrupt, when they’re irregular, when they get caught, they’re terminated, and I very easily win,’ Trump said.

Earlier Wednesday, former Trump national security advisor Mike Flynn blasted out an article that called on Trump to declare martial law and have the military oversee a revote. 

Trump released the video about an hour after Biden began an event in Wilmington where he held a roundtable with workers and small business owners struggling through the economic crisis.